Johannes sends “marriage” greetings

Here's more support from another legendary member of the OpenID community, Johannes Ernst of Netmesh. He's the inventor of LID, and one of the strongest champions for the “URL-based” identity used in OpenID. He brought ideas his together with Brad Fitzpatrick's quite a while ago now, creating one of the first synergy-lurches for the community.

I should also point out that Johannes has also been one of the first, and most tireless, advocates of the synergy between OpenID and Information Cards. He has given many cycles to OSIS, the group that has co-ordinated open source work around identity selectors and information card technology. The beautiful thing here is that convergence with CardSpace MEANS convergence with Information Cards in general, including the Higgins project and work by many others in the community. I've been concentrating on CardSpace for obvious reasons, but to me it is very important that this goes far beyond CardSpace into another whole community.

Wow! After two years of hard work, we are finally getting real convergence in identity land! Today, Bill Gates is announcing has announced in his keynote at the RSA conference that Microsoft will support OpenID. Here are some posts covering the news:

At NetMesh, we've held for a long time that URL-based identity (OpenID, with its roots LID, i-names and Sxip), and other technologies such as CardSpace have to come together so we can really get to an interoperable, multi-vendor, user-centric identity layer for the open internet. That's why we helped put together OSIS, and lots of activities of that nature.

Now even Bill Gates supports the same vision! Yippie!! (apologies for being too excited, but this is exciting!)

Just pointed out to my wife â€” who wrote the first line of code, ever, about three years ago, implementing URL-based identity â€” that in some way, she should now be famous!